Second Coming
by PoeticElegance
Summary: Preston/Partridge. Errol remembers in the moments before death- remembers feelings.


In the moment when the bullet travels from your weapon to my head, I remember. And, every human should know, the things you remember in the moment before you die are _feelings_.

I remember the day when I brought home some award or such from school, decades ago. I don't remember the award. But I do remember the moment when I saw something breach my father's face, something I don't remember seeing before that day. When he looked at whatever it was I brought home, and he looked at me, and _love_ won a small battle with the usual impassivity. I remember the feeling spilling from his eyes.

I remember the time my own calm was breached by a piece of art. I remember the Francis Bacon painting, the way the ferocity of its emotion pierced me. Pierced through my regular dosage of that morning.

Remembering that moment was what caused me to steal my first piece of contraban, and I now also remember that day. The one when I first read one of the poems of G. M. Hopkins. The intensity and emotions were so foreign to me, yet they moved me. The words so avidly expressing a desperate beauty. I remember crying, seeing that there existed a man who lived passionately for something that I had never experienced.

I remember a lot of vague feelings that came after that. The stings I experienced when I saw Hopkins after Hopkins be executed, all dying for a cause I had caught a glimpse of, but could not totally grasp.

Needless to say, I remember the time I first skipped my dosage. But it's become such a default happiness that the memory is almost vague, just peaceful bliss and understanding.

I remember that my first glimpse of Mary was very similar to my first exposure to poetry. Overwhelming beauty, which faded into a warmer, more constant, and less achingly beautiful, feeling.

But most of all, I remember you. I remember most vividly the first time we made love when I was off my dosage. I even, I think, remember some soft, undefined feelings about the times before, and I suspect that our sex was never completely free of emotion, at least on my part. But the time after I'd begun skipping, those are the intense feelings that fill my memory and my soul in the instant before your bullet penetrates my skin.

As I watched you undress- as your strong hands unhurriedly peeled your clothing to reveal muscular shoulders that I had been dreaming about lately and which shocked me at that moment in the violence of their aesthetic beauty- in this moment, I felt scared. I felt myself shuddering already, only your torso exposed to my new eyes, and feared that you would surely notice. If you didn't notice something strange right then, then certainly my reactions of all that you were about to do would become even more terribly obvious. I was paralyzed, knowing that any move I might make, or any touch you might place, would give away my trembling in an instant.

Didn't you notice? I think you must have, to some extent. When you looked at me, took in the sight of me, and I felt exposed as never before, even though I was yet fully clothed, you freed me. I think I must have seen some sort of acceptance in your glance, even if you were not aware of it. And I knew I could move again.

So I did. I remember thinking that the real drug was not the one I had been taking every day for the years of an endless past, no. The real drug was you in that moment. Seeing the skin of your chest filled me with an intense feeling, a satisfying euphoria, and yet I needed more. Addicted, I was, right then. I had to reveal _more_ of your skin. And I needed it in the closest proximity possible.

I pressed myself to you, smashing hip with hip, sternum with sternum, mouth with mouth. I hadn't the focus to question what you were thinking of my unrestrained passion. All my focus was on trying to consume your beauty via your warm mouth.

But you didn't push me away. I grew a little more comfortable, thinking abstractly that maybe I was not, in fact, acting any differently, and that I was only perceiving everything, including my own reactions, differently.

And even if my actions were disconcertingly unusual, I was at a loss to stop them.

I remember the taste of you as I traveled my tongue away from your mouth, across the sharp line of your jaw, down the column of your neck and the planes of your torso. I had to close my eyes. The intensity of your taste was too overwhelming I had to focus completely on it.

And as my teeth began to scrape across hair, my mouth traveling below you navel, I had to expose the rest of you. I slipped my hands between you hips and the fabric hugging them. I slid the clothing down, the movement a caress of all of your skin in the path of my palms.

I could only open my eyes for the shortest of moments, as the sight they were met with was you flesh standing, reaching towards me. I could not help but try to consume its beauty, and take it into my mouth as my eyes closed again.

I heard your gasp, felt your own body trembling as mine had been, and tasted your cock, all more deeply than ever before. I thought I would burst from the overload of pure sensation.

When you pulled my hair and tugged me back into a standing position in front of you, my fear returned to me. I was afraid that my intentness on your beauty had revealed my secret.

But as I looked in your eyes, I questioned that. I couldn't determine what it was that caused you to force me stop. It was not, as I had been fearing, clearly anger. I could not decipher your eyes; the drug of my emotions was making me fancy I saw things in them, things that I never saw in them.

But then you closed them and you took my mouth back with your own. I felt your hands pulling at my clothing, and, after what felt like a blazing maze of abstract tracings upon my body, our bodies were pressed together in the purity of total, alive, hungry nakedness.

In my focus on your body I had forgotten our surroundings until I was physically reminded of them as you pressed me down to the sheets on the bed.

Too few minutes of warm fumblings followed. You were eager for completion, as we both had been on the countless times before this one. But this time I was happy drowning in the sensation of our bodies pressing against one another with only gradual escalation.

In the moment before you took me I feel that it was too soon, that I wanted to explore your body more. I felt oppressed by the blindness the position you put me in offered. I wanted more of the sensation of seeing you and tasting you, burying my nose in the scent of you hair. And I felt annoyed that you were denying me that, pressing my body into the mattress.

But all that disappeared in the moment you entered me, dissolved into a wonder that I had ever survived without this sensation.

The sensation of completion, an intensely emotional love for this moment, for you inside me, filled me to the brim.

I thought you must have noticed, for you shoved into me hard, it felt akin to punishment. Or did you know that was what I wanted?

I gave up trying to control my actions- it was useless. All the past times were a great haze, I could not remember how vocal, how responsive, how fast I had habitually been. There was no use trying to act the part I could not remember the lines to.

I remember I found myself grinding back against you, arching my back and bending my head down to the hands I'd clenched into fists beneath me, and feeling more passionate than ever. I remember feeling your own head resting between my shoulder blades, a center of warmth not quite equal, but sister to the explosion of heat you were creating inside me.

That explosion grew and took over my whole body, my whole self, after only those few short minutes.

You reached down to touch my cock and just that simplistic, lazy touch sent me shooting with unprecedented vehemence across the mussed bedsheets. My passion spilled physically out into the open, my secret utterly revealed.

A blinding wave of euphoria, and then, gradual slipping back into a hazy, yet vivid, perception of the beauty and pleasure surrounding me.

I felt you go on, and loved every second, even though I'd already climaxed. The warmth of your explosion inside me, your pressing against my back as it happened, the rough beauty of your panting- I pushed backwards into all of these things, leaning into all you had to offer me. I chuckle now at the thought that it was almost intense enough to be called a Second Coming, but of course, I hadn't really the strength for that.

Your aura in those moments was like the great beast slinking towards Bethlehem in this poem I was reading a minute ago. Then, you were this great and terrible beauty that took up all my fascination, impossible not to notice all your power. But I could not tell if your great force was to be benevolent or malevolent, if the glint in your eyes was of a vicious or a passionate nature. But I remember being impressed by whatever it was, and the fatality of it. The inevitability of the future, your reaction, was impressed upon me as solidly as your body was.

I realize now that I always had as strong a sense of doom about it as Yeats did for his beast.

I look into your eyes and try to tell you with all the sincerity of my feeling that I accept what you are bringing me. I have faith in you, that even though I am doomed to be killed by you in this moment, something beautiful will rise out of my ashes, out of you. That night, the one I remember most vividly, I know you saw something, even if you did not realize what it was until now. You surely called it suspicion and aptly-placed mistrust, but it will change, I believe. It will grow out all you have been and rise.

I feel all this in the moment after you have pulled the trigger, and even as it happens I feel the feeling I'm expressing with my eyes change something in your own, just the slightest bit. I know you will some day soon remember this look and try to figure out its meaning. And I know you will one day succeed. One day you will feel the beauty of the world and you will understand what you saw in me that one night. I have faith in you.

My last thought is to wonder if you will bother to read this Yeats poem, and then I am swallowed up by the warmth of my father's eyes.


End file.
